The invention relates to methods and equipment for delivering customized advertisements to customers.
A general problem with advertising is that most of the time, customers are flooded with advertisements which are irrelevant to their current activities. In other words, most advertisements are related to products or services in which the viewer is not at all interested, or the viewer could be interested in the advertisement, but only at a more appropriate time.
Advertisers are fiercely competing about a non-extendible resource, namely the perception ability of the potential customers. It has been estimated that one contemporary newspaper issue contains as much information as a typical 17th-century citizen received in his or her lifetime. As a result, the advertisers are in a zero-sum competition wherein one medium's or advertiser's gain is the loss of another.
Advertisers try to make educated guesses about the needs of their potential customers. For instance, when an Internet user views the web pages of an on-line vendor, the vendor may assume that the user in question has at least a mild interest in telecommunications, web browsing, etc, and consequently, the initial advertisements are typically selected from such items. An advertiser may employ a system which selects an advertisement from a database by using simple correlation between data entered by the user and the advertisement. For example, entering the word ‘trousers’ to a web search engine may result in an advertisement for a clothing company being displayed. When the user makes a purchase, his/her identity is stored and the next time s/he views the same vendor's web pages, s/he may be displayed an advertisement based on previous purchase behaviour. However, a hit to a certain web page or an on-line purchase from the vendor gives little or no actual information on the user's future behaviour. For instance, a business may have been buying computers regularly, but in fact their last computer purchase was the last one needed in the foreseeable future, and no further computers are needed. Thus prior art advertisement delivery mechanisms are based on predictions of user behaviour which are extrapolated from current or past behaviour. Such extrapolation may lead to false conclusions, which is why prior art advertisement delivery mechanisms provide irrelevant information and thus waste economical and technical resources.